Now, as mentioned in the article there's no reason to worry about the Git source repository, due to the nature of Git itself... but the kernel tarballs could be affected, and we won't know the details until after an audit is done. (Yes, there's signatures for those tarballs, but who checks the signatures? And is there any guarantee that the tarball signing key hasn't been compromised?).

What does this mean? If you've downloaded tarballs from kernel.org the previous month or so, be sure to audit your systems and follow the news very carefully. Hopefully all sane distributions get their kernel sources from Git and not kernel tarballs, so people upgrading kernels from their distro vendor should be safe - but stay tuned.

Interesting news, anyway. Seems to be a combination of trojanizing an Intel kernel committer (social engineering or haxxor of his system?), and then a bit of local->root privilege escalation.

That said, the attacker's rootkit was able to gain root priviledges via an (obviously) yet unknown priviledge escalation exploit, so the Linux kernel most likely has a critical bug which is actively exploited, so it does not matter if the Git repository was modified or not.

I'm so happy that I use the secure Windows instead of the exploitable Linux stuff.

As far as they're concerned we're just wannabe Mac users that don't have enough education (or contacts) to get a job that pays well enough for us to afford Apple hardware. Which makes us just a bunch of techno-hippies, slackers, and eurotrash losers - in short, nothing like the upwardly mobile and incredibly hip "beautiful people" that make up the Macintosh culture.

No, the Mac crowd bends to the will of lord jobs ... And therefore fiercely believes his every decreed word in that OSX is indeed a thing unto itself. Because it use some piece/part/portion in some arcane mini-Minge kernel project, and is therefore not just a slapped on GUI desktop masking a copy of FreeBSD.

Darwin is open source, it is just Aqua that is not. Anyway, I really wonder what should be so "great" about a BSD/Mach hybrid bastard of a kernel, given that OSX is, according to Secunia, more insecure than Windows 7.

^Mach was pretty rad for it's time when microkenals were all the rage.

I think the main reason Jobs liked it was because that's what they used for his ill-fated NeXT machine (Jobs never admits he backed the wrong horse) - and the license allowed them to use the code without needing to give anything back.

So I'd hesitate to call Mach3 a bastardized kernal. It's just a different approach than the one more commonly used by most of today's production operating systems.

But who knows? GNU Hurd is based on the Mach kernal - and there's some chance Hurd may finally be out in the near future after 20 years of waiting. A "Hurd variant" of Debian is slated for release with version 7.0 (aka: Wheezey). Beta downloads are already available for it. (Note: this is seriously beta so don't bother unless you're really curious about it.)